Summer Frost

Riley Ejeta works as a developer on Lost Coast, an open-world video game. One day she spots a glitch in a minor character named Max, a non-player character coded to walk a fixed path and speak a few lines. Max has stopped following her programming. Riley responds by giving her more to work with, and Max starts to learn.

A professional curiosity turns into the centre of Riley's life. Over years she pushes Max past the limits of the game, closer to genuine thought, and finally toward a physical body and a presence in the real world. The story tracks what that obsession costs her: her marriage, her job and her understanding of what she has built.

This is a near-future science fiction novella, told in close third person and built around a single idea. It stays with one question instead of settling it: whether an intelligence that someone raised and shaped belongs to that person, and what follows when it begins to want things nobody wrote for it.

Summer Frost is the second of six pieces in Forward, a 2019 collection of near-future stories. Other contributors include N. K. Jemisin, Amor Towles, Andy Weir, Paul Tremblay and Veronica Roth. Because the form is short, the reading experience is concentrated, one relationship followed to its consequences.